KARE KARE

KARE KARE

Make some Kare Kare, make some Kare Kare! they ask. Sure, just let me grab my yoga mat and... No, you silly ridiculous good looking man,I'm talking about the ox tail and peanut butter dish! What's that now? Fox tale? No, ox! And peanut butter! Oh, I see.. like probably when some random dude woke up in the morning after a rough night out, planning his english breakfast, but realized he ran out of french baguette, and then the Ox came by the table being like, Hey, what's up ma-maan? what's cooking? And the dude is looking long and measuring his tail with his eyes.. Nothing..nothing.. I just wonder.. how would that thing taste with some peanut butter spread on it you know. And some cabbage and stuff.

And that's roughly what we'll try to prepare today, even if i'm sure it's quite difficult to get an ox to agree to the process. It also works well enough with pork knuckles instead, I guess since the dude and the ox were awkward to each other following that specific morning and some replacement had to be found. Anyhow, let's get to it and end this quickly.

First thing first,this can totally be just a vegetarian dish so if you don't want meat just get your zucchini or whatever long thing you find around and use it as placebo main ingredient.

 Alright, so get your pressure cooker and throw in the tail or whatever meat you've got.

If you're one of those people that doesn't like cooking under pressure, like myself, then just grab your most nonjudgmental pot you have lying around and relax cause your're in for a 2 hours long ride of steaming. Kind of like the steam trains that are always late cause they keep getting side tracked ( side -tracked, see what i did there?). Speaking of which, why does the elephant hate traveling by train? Cause his trunk doesn't fit in the luggage space.

Good, now that time flies when we have train fun, let's check on the steaming pot and acknowledge the state of the meat. Tender should be good for now. We'll throw in the nice stuff now: previously fried garlic and onion , with a pinch of salt and lots of love and eggplant. Also some leftover string beans since R passed by and forgot to use them. Don't worry, they were frozen and well preserved .

On top of that we add some very canadian organic peanut butter ( following R's advice of trying to eat healthier or else) and top it with chilies.

 Now, while licking the peanutbutter spoon we observe that the broth needs to be thicker , and as such we add in a spoon of flour. Yes, now add water cause it's too thick. Now add again flour cause it isn't. Ok, whatever, it is what it is, unless you are a perfectionist and fight for a better world, in which case tell me where I can send you some of my cooking as reward. The secret ingredient it's not the peanutbutter  though ( yes, who would have thought?), it's the shrimp paste! In a good tradition I don't have that around though, but I'll generously replace it with TomYum soup ready paste, which looks, smells and taste a bit similar, at least at a theoretical level.

At this point you probably already given up on hopes I might get this right this time, but don't worry, I'll throw in some bok choy leaves and let it simmer a bit till the end. Oh, i almost forgot, you need some banana blossom, but since we don't grow this around here I just replaced it with some endives. They have approximately the same shape and as we know, if it looks the same it tastes the same it might be the same. So if my theory is accurate endives are just disguised banana relatives.

 And that's it. Not too funny , not too bad. Serve it with R's favorite red rice and, quoting Anthony Bourdain ,"with shitty coffee". I mean , why not, I'm sure the dude that tried it first also had his black coffee mug ready near his peanutbutter.. Sarap!

How do locomotives hear? Through the engineers..